Friday, January 21, 2011

Adventures in Spam

I'm not a very popular online personality. I mean, only 9 people follow me here, only about 120 on twitter, and I'm pretty sure most of the the 600 friends on facebook are really more acquaintances than anything.

So I was pretty sure the sudden 144 followers on twitter had to be spam.

I decided to check each one out, because you never know if you might have just had a super awesome rise in popularity or if it really was just spam.

I also decided to do my civic duty and report each one for spam. This task involved me opening each one and individually clicking "report as spam"

This idea turned out to be an awesome adventure in spam.I blocked a few of the spammers at first, because they didn't have those typical "click here" tweets. They seemed different and if they weren't spam, I just didn't want them to follow me.But then, I realized...all of these people had the same tweets!

So I decided to document this hour long task, so you could laugh as much as me...

These are the typical tweets the 144 people had...

After awhile of looking at game gear, xbox2 and developing crap...I noticed this...

Hmm...Sherry476 stole something from her school library...

Omg Brooke940 did too!

And Tisa515! You devil you!

LESA858!

At this point, I was sure that what I was doing was helping. I mean, if anything I was helping twitter identify people who have stolen books from their local library.

Then things got weird.

Who is Raguel046 talking to?

It looks like Lilly762 is super excited about not being spammed

but... wait, whats this about cookies?

Sharan512 sets things straight

This one is my favorite. I'm through about 120 of them by now and each one has the same type of tweets. Except Han939. Han939 is mother effing CRAZY.

After about 120 of them, it seems the spammer got tired of making up names.

And after about 120 of them, it seems them spammer got tired of searching for unique photos.And then, after 144 of them, I realized that somehow this spammer is taking all of these tweets from articles, blogs, other tweets, etc.

It took about an hour to get this done, but I think I filled up my internet kharma by reporting all of this spam. My followers went right back down to 120ish and I am back to being an unpopular internet persona.

I do want to say that I really liked that one fictional moment when I had 264 followers. It was nice.